BEST EVER BEER BAR: Warpigs

Quick disclaimer: we visited this place over a year ago. I wrote the story so I thought it was worth posting. The post has not been edited by Natasha, so it may just be the ramblings of a Dyslexic madman.

Ok that is a pretty strong statement to start this post off with and over the next few paragraphs, I will try to back up that statement. For a start off the bar is located in Copenhagen’s meat packing district, which is not code for Gay villiage it is actual a district where they use to process and pack meat. That has all moved and it has since become a hipster play ground with trendy bars and restaurants. Right bang in the middle of it is WarPigs brew pub. A huge place that could probably seat 300 people inside and out comfortably.

The first impression when you walk into the place is a school canteen it has many long communal tables and a food service area where you order collect then pay for your food just like a high school canteen. The concept of the place is more causal compared to Mikkeller bar. Its more about social than beer geek, which I defiantly like as it takes the pretentious element out. For this reason most beers you can only get in 400ml servings. Its about enjoying one or two beers with friend rather than trying 10. This is something a bar should always aim to be. For this reason a lot of the beers on the menu have an emphasize on drinkability rather than being experimental. This make it the perfect place to come to after work for a few descent beers.

The majority of the the food on the menu is meat with only couple of vegetarian sides. This is defiantly not a Vegan friendly place, as every vegetable option comes with dairy but that is perfectly fine by us. All the meat options have been dry rubbed and smoked for 24 hours in one of the two smokers. The options available when we where there were Beef short rib, Beef brisket, Hot links, Special links, Pork shoulder and half a chicken. We went for the Beef brisket, Pork shoulder and Hot links, with side order of potatoes salad and Pork rinds. We washed all this down with free flow soft drinks and a pint of Pale ale. The soft drinks were great as they were some old school flavours you dont get anymore like blueberry and sasparilo, plus they did not contained corn syrup.

After our fill of meat we were giving a tour round the microbrewery by assistant brewer Lan-xin Foo (Some people might remember her from here time working at Ibrew). The brewery is of German design and quite a manual system with lots of valves to adjust. It can brew 500L batches, which means they have to brew twice to fill one of the fermentors. They do hope at one point to be able to brew enough to supply all 20 taps but for now they just try to make sure 6 taps are always on where the rest is made up by other breweries particular three Floyd’s and Mikkeller beers. The main part of the brewery is on show in the bar/restaurant, but surprisingly this converted butchery has lots of rooms in the back.

In the first back room we entered is the grain mill and grain conveyor, which is a chain driven systems which moves the milled grain from the hopper to where it is needed the mash tun. The next room contained six 1000 litre fermentors, which were all busy brewing collaboration beers with other brewers that had attended CBC like one fermenter had speedway stout init. The adjacent room was really cool as it housed White Labs European lab and growth facility. This is a small one man operation developing and providing yeasts for the Mikkeller operation. Around the corner from here was a room containing six more fermentors or bright tanks.

After this we went outside so we could go downstairs into the secret cellar where all the crazy aging shit happens. There were loads of different barrels in here all aging different things. They have whiskey, bourbon, sherry, Japanese whiskey and wine. This room concluded our tour, we passed one of the two smokers on the way back to the bar apparently the fire has not been out since it was started over a month ago.

Now a quick word about the beers all the warpig beer a pretty darn good, I like the Real Estate Mongolian and Garbage patch, which was developed from one of Lan-xin Foo’s homebrew recipes. They also had bottles for sale and were selling Dark Lord for $120 for 500ml, which is crazy. Defiantly worth a visit if you happened to be in Copenhagen.